The Cactus Café Test: Student Engineers, One More Mixer, and Why Being Helpful Wins
Last night I was at the Cactus Café in Austin, Texas with Katherion. This is actually one local place I haven’t played before. Been a a lot. It was fun—beautiful room, absolutely wonderful.
They had student sound engineers, which initially sounds like a bug, but it wasn’t. They’re really nice people, which isn’t always the case with our sound engineers. You know it. Don’t try to deny it.
The band sounded good. Again, it was just bass and drums and tracks, and then Kat singing. The weak spot is we need to mix our own in-ears. Then I’ll love it, because then we can all hear it.
I do have a solution. It's a mixer I was going to sell, but now I’m not, because I really do want to get these ears right. I don’t want to give myself another job, but hearing this stuff is more important—and we don’t play that much—so it will be fine. It does mean one more piece of equipment, but I can always go direct with my bass and not have to lug around that whole setup.
All in all, a good gig.
We played the Eros record straight through, which I don’t love doing because there are a lot of songs that are in the same keys—two each—and they’re all next to each other on the record, so it gets confusing. And there’s 10 songs and there’s probably six that share chord structures, and that’s not a knock. I used to play in a reggae band. You had to stay in it because the songs were long, they were jammy, you were getting a lot of secondhand smoke, and to remember what was going on and what song you were in and what chords you were on was really challenging. You had to stay in the groove the whole time. You couldn’t get out of that.
So it was a good show. She’ll have a baby in a month, so that’s the last full-band show we do for a bit. We do have an acoustic show coming up, but this was the last full-band one.
And I was so glad I printed the set list and did stuff like that. Everybody was happy—if you read the entry yesterday about being helpful, that made a better show for her, and that made me happy. More happy than “hey, you played great,” “hey, you look great,” “hey, you’re the most handsome person in the world,” whatever. Knowing that I was doing small stuff to make our show better, easier, and more fulfilling is the most important part.